Performance evaluation of a WiMAX testbed under VoIP traffic

Among several first mile solutions proposed so far, the key advantage of the IEEE 802.16 standard, widely known as WiMAX, is to ensure large area coverage and rather inexpensive equipment at the subscriber side. Modern requirements to wireless connectivity include mandatory QoS guarantees for a wide set of real-time applications: this is the case of the ever growing trend of VoIP calls. To this aim, WiMAX supports natively real-time traffic. In this paper, we report on the results of measurements performed on a WiMAX Alvarion testbed, located in Turin, Italy. In particular, through synthetic VoIP traffic generation, we obtained the corresponding E-model figures, thus tracing the system operation intervals.